A STRIKING match, a piece of aluminum foil, Lucky Strike cigarettes or two dollar notes. You don’t think twice about these things but to him they are the triggers that pull him back to a dark past. He calls it his lost youth. And he is only 25. Dzulfadly believes his life has been predestined and trusts the path he follows today. “I think it’s put down for you. I am just walking through it”

There were two worlds Dzul inhabited as a child growing up in Eunos Crescent. There was the one with his family in their five-room HDB apartment. When I ask him about his childhood he tells me that the memories are vague. At best there is the hazy notion of sharing a room with his other siblings, sleeping at night on a mat on the floor, somebody’s feet always in his face. He remembers that the black leather sofa at some point turned into a brown upholstered sofa, that the curtains were changed every Hari Raya and that the faces of his grandparents stared out at him from behind the frames of yellowing black and white photographs that curled at the edges. His Indonesian grandfather had passed down an oil painting that was hung on one of the white painted walls. An idyllic country scene, quaint thatch hut set against the grandeur of mountains, valleys and rivers. The only interest Dzul had in it back then was to fantasize about living there on his own and away from his family.

Then there was the other world Dzul created at an age when most other kids are busy preparing for young adulthood. If you had known him back then he would have been able to tell you at he age of 12 that the guy who had the most drugs ruled and that there was a unspoken hierarchy which he and other gang members followed without question. He would have told you that being with them was better than staying at home watching television with the rest of the family as days drifted into nights. He would have said it was better to fritter away time on the void decks playing marbles than sit in his room on the second floor staring out at the small exercise area his room forced to watch couples having sex or doing drugs among the bushes.

And Dzul can’t be sure today but he thinks it was in either one of these two worlds that his death game with drugs began. On paper his life might look like the textbook life of a high-risk teenager. A disaster slowly boiling, a life haphazardly stitched together and bursting, ripping at the seams. Both his parents worked and were rarely at home. No one supervised his free time; no one made him do his homework. If he did misbehave and he says that it was often, his mother would beat him with whatever she could get her hands on – the cane, coat hangers or her favourite, the end of a rubber water pipe. There was never any discussion about his bad behaviour. He would just cop it and then go to his room sulking to lick his wounds.

“It’s funny because actually the group of friends I mixed with back then were not interested in doing dope” he tells me as we sit on the floor of the gym he now works in. “They thought the kids who did drugs were stupid and stayed away from them”. But that initial wisdom was not to last. One day while he was out catching fish in a drain, another group of boys he was acquainted with arrived on the scene carrying a stash of pot or marijuana. He tried it for the first time and remembered that he was laughing till nighttime. After that there was no stopping him. “I didn’t go to school, smoked everyday, played soccer at night then went home and crashed”

It was when he was about 15 that heroin entered the equation. He was at a friend’s house one day when a guy arrived with neatly sealed packets of the white powder. Dzul knew it colloquially as White, Hero and Obat. But that was about all he knew. “Trying heroin was going to be a lot different from using pot and I was scared” The blank spaces about heroin made him decline the chance to use it. But his decision had been made out of fear not wisdom and the temptation to try it was too much. For three weeks Dzul thought of nothing else.

“I finally caved in, took my set of dumbbells, sold them for $200 and went looking for it”

The urge led him to Tun Tun, a neighbourhood trafficker who sold him a packet for $80. That packet led to a hundred others and opened a door for Dzul that would eventually close all others in his young life.

“I changed after that. It wasn’t about conscience. I didn’t have one any more”

To feed his habit, Dzul started selling small quantities of heroin to others, always rolling over the money he earnt to buy his own stash. But even this twisted entrepreneurial spirit did not always ensure that he had a supply for what became his daily use of the drug.

Dzul is no stranger to the effects of heroin withdrawal on the body, the “sick” period addicts go through when they can’t feed the time bomb they have planted in their own bodies. But Dzul had his ways of coping. On the days he couldn’t get his stash, Dzul would down a potentially lethal cocktail of cough mixture, sleeping pills and alcohol to stop the excruciating pain of heroin withdrawal. The combination of the codeine in the cough mixture, the alcohol and barbiturates had a numbing effect on his senses, often knocking him out. When he did wake it would be to a zombie like blur of consciousness. It wasn’t perfect but at least it stopped him from feeling anything.

“Those times I did things I cannot remember today”

Friends have told him that he once, dulled by this cocktail, Dzul tried to break his own arm because he could not bear going to school anymore.

You’re thinking this story will eventually wind up with Dzul getting arrested and thrown into a detention center but you would be wrong. Dzul was never caught for taking drugs. The mother who he says did not know how to handle him, the one he says he had no communication with, that same woman would come to force Dzul to confront his addiction head on.

It happened when Dzul’s grandfather passed away. While family member gathered to pay their last respects to her frail body that lay in the hall, Dzul slunk away to his room to chase the dragon. As phrases from the quran filtered through the corridors during the religious ceremony, Dzul sat on his bed ready to get high and block out the darkness of death and family and responsibility. It was going t be beautiful. That was when his mother walked into the room. Despite seeing the stash on the bed, she said nothing, turned on her heels and walked out of the room. A fiercely proud woman, Dzul’s mother had no intention of causing a scene with the whole family present. Instead she waited till everyone had left before forcibly locking Dzul inside the apartment to stop him from getting any more dope and into a period of withdrawal that this time, he could do nothing to stop. His forced imprisonment infuriated Dzul and he threatened to slit his wrists if his mother did not let him out.

“I would have thrown myself out of the window but we lived on the second storey and I probably would have just broken a bone!” he laughs today.

After several weeks of this, Dzul’s mother eventually let him out on the condition that he stay away from his junkie buddies and stay clean. He made the promises but he couldn’t keep them. Instead he headed straight back to Tun Tun and started using again.

When his mother discovered his relapse, she admitted him to Pertapis, a Muslim halfway house in Geylang. He did not know it at the time but he would remain there for the next three years. It was at Pertapis that Dzul says he learnt the meaning of family.

“It was like a real home, a real family and the love was genuine” Dzul’s dependence on the community of the center was so great at one time that even when he had home leave he avoided going home.

It was at Pertapis that Dzul first met Sheik Alau’ddin, a world champion Silat medallist. The sportsman had wanted to teach Silat at the center and Dzul was put in charge of organizing the adolescents for their practice sessions.

“At first I just watched but decided to join in to motivate the kids a little”

That innocent intention led to Dzul taking his Silat training seriously. After one month intensive training with Sheik Alau’ddin, Dzul won a national competition and began training with the national team.

Since he quit dope, Dzul’s list of qualifications has taken on a life of its own, giving him that direction he always craved. Today he is Business Development Manager at LA Fitness Centre. He has a Diploma in Fitness & Nutrition and is a Qualified Personal Trainer certified by the National Academy Sports Medicine USA. And that doesn’t even begin to include the numerous medals he has won at national and international levels for Silat and Body Building. Dzul took the Silver Medal (Silat), Philippine Open Championship 1999, the Silver Medal (Silat), Belgium Open Championship 2001 and the Bronze medal for bodybuilding at the Singapore National Championship in 2002.

Dzul says he looks forward, as forward as a 25 year old can. But the ghosts of that early past still haunt him.

“I wish my mother had said something. I was fighting all the time, thieving, stealing anything I could. My mum knew about it but she never tried to stop me.” Dzul is looking at me, reading the thought that is already in my head. “Yah, maybe she didn’t know how”

Dzul’s angst over the bitter memories of his past jar with the aspirations he has today.

“Happiness means achieving your goals. And I am not satisfied with my life yet.”

When I ask him what he means there is no hesitation before he gives me an answer.

“I haven’t made my mother happy. I let her down. Totally. At times I blamed my parents for my addiction. But it was my choice”

But I wonder. Can something as insidious, as life changing and damaging as addiction boil down to a simple act of choice? The way we choose our shoes, or our TV programmes or what to eat for dinner? Why would it be so difficult to get off addiction if we could simply choose to do it?

For Dzul heroin offered a distraction from noticing how tense his young life had been, a euphoria that seemed to make his energy increase to the point of believing he had some kind of control over it. I start to wonder if what addicts are hooked on more than the drugs, maybe what we are all hooked on, is that effort to control life.

I asked Dzul what he found beautiful in this world. The first things that came to his mind were his staples – the ladies, martial arts and his snakes. But he adds something else that I don’t expect. “Focus makes it happen. Doing drugs was beautiful. Then.”